Capital Dilemma

Capital DILEMMA G E R M A N Y ’ S S E A R C H fo r a N E W A R C H I T E C T U R E of D E M O C R A C Y

M ICHAE L Z . W I S E

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East 7th Street New York, New York 10003 212.995.9620 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.

Visit our web site at www.papress.com. ©1998 Michael Z.Wise All rights reserved Printed and bound in the United States 02 010099 98 5 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book my be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Editing and design: Clare Jacobson Index: Marty Jezer Special thanks to: Eugenia Bell, Jane Garvie, Caroline Green,Therese Kelly, Mark Lamster, Anne Nitschke, and Sara E. Stemen of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wise, Michael Z., 1957– Capital dilemma: Germany’s search for a new architecture of democracy / Michael Z.Wise. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56898-134-1 1. Architecture and state—Germany—Berlin.

2. National socialism and architecture—Germany —Berlin. 3. Architecture, Modern—20th century —Germany—Berlin. 4. Berlin (Germany)— Buildings, structures, etc. I.Title.

NA1085.W58 1998 725’.0943’15507444361—DC21 97-45030 CIP

Endsheets Front: Model of Albert Speer’s proposed north-south axis for Berlin (never realized), 1938, photo courtesy Landesbildstelle Berlin.

Back: Federal Strip designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, the winning entry in postunification Berlin’s Spreebogen competition, photo courtesy Axel Schultes Architekten.

CONTENTS

11 Introduction HEADQUARTERS FOR A DIVIDED NATION

23 Bonn: Capital of Self-Effacement 39 East Berlin: Communism Pursues Grandeur DESIGNING NEW IMAGES OF POWER

57 Master Plan for a Government District 65 Choosing a Chancellery 81 Presidential Office: Glittering Jewel or Dark Fortress?

BURDENSOME LEGACIES

89 109 121 135

Nazism’s Architectural Remnants Communist Relics Norman Foster’s Reichstag: Illuminating Shadows of the Past I. M. Pei and a Prussian Inheritance MEMORY IN THE NEW BERLIN

145 Monuments to Victims, Not Heroes 155 Hesitation by Design 159 161 171 177

Acknowledgments Notes List of Sources Index

To my parents, Bobbi and Zelig Wise

If anyone inquires about the higher authority that directs everything, it is never to be found in one spot. . . . We are afraid of a capital. —Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

INTRODUCTION

Like stories written in stone, capitals across the globe embody national identity and historical consciousness. Be it the Mall in Washington, d.c., the Kremlin in Moscow, or the Forbidden City in Beijing, capital city buildings and urban planning have the power to awe, to alienate, to inspire, and to intimidate. But possibly no nation is more attuned to the political manipulation of built imagery than Germany. The decision to move its government seat from Bonn to Berlin by the year 2000 has set off a remarkable debate about what kind of official architecture is appropriate for a country whose past has rendered patriotism suspect and whose expressions of national pride have, as a result, been consigned to the soccer field.The impassioned, often vituperative, discussion about the redesign of Berlin following the fall of communism offers a valuable lens through which to consider Germany’s future direction and its relationship to the past.

Modern German cities, Adolf Hitler lamented in Mein Kampf, lack monumental architecture and potent symbols of nationhood. Hitler set out to remedy this by transforming Berlin into “Germania,” a capital worthy of his Thousand Year Reich. Immediately after the 1940 conquest of Paris, he announced plans to rebuild Berlin in a “style commensurate with the grandeur of our victory.”1 His architect, Albert Speer, had already drawn up a vast north-south axis, a via triumphalis for the Führer of Europe and beyond. For one end of the never-realized scheme, a soaring domed hall was proposed. Its cavernous interior was so large—accommodating up to 180,000 people—that the architect anticipated the problem of clouds forming beneath the vaulted ceiling. Speer envisioned at the boulevard’s other terminus a victory arch more than twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe.

Introduction

Over half a century after Nazism’s demise, democratic Germany fittingly selected Paris as the place to open a major exhibition about the latest architectural recreation of Berlin. The array of models and drawings projected how the metropolis would look at the dawn of the next millennium.This unusual public relations exercise conveyed not just images and information about the new buildings of the once-and-future capital, but an explicit diplomatic message as well. “The exhibition strives to make clear that German policy will not change as a result of the move from Bonn to Berlin,” wrote Building Minister Klaus Töpfer in the brochure distributed to visitors.2 The attempt to reassure Germany’s neighbors about the historic transfer highlights the significance Germans attach to the link between architecture and politics. Indeed, Germany has assigned architecture a pivotal role throughout its turbulent twentieth-century history. Prior to its successive rule by the century’s warring ideologies, Nazism and communism, Germany gave birth to the Bauhaus movement, whose founders argued that their own revolutionary designs could shape human destiny.

Other pioneering German architects, like Bruno Taut and Wassily Luckhardt, devised elaborate crystalline structures they regarded as moral beacons of a shining future. Convulsive events like the fall of the monarchy in 1918, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and the defeat of his Third Reich in 1945 all have left their mark on German architecture and design.

“Time and again it was to be made clear in stone that from now on everything was to be different,” a postwar architect wrote of the repeated stylistic changes.3 How will the official architecture of unified Berlin, a democratic capital being built amid totalitarian remains, be different this time around?

That question, and the various strategies the Germans have devised to address it, are the subject of this book. Several writers have examined the political underpinnings of earlier twentieth-century German state architecture. Many others have analyzed modern Germany in political or economic terms. But this book offers the first overview of the postwar and

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Introduction

now postunification effort by the democratic German state to present itself in built form.The transfer of the Bundestag (the national legislature) and leading government bodies to Berlin poses an epic design challenge, a capital dilemma at the root of which lie the painful memories of past regimes. Berlin is haunted by its history as font of Prussian militarism, seat of a failed bid at democracy under the Weimar Republic, headquarters of genocidal Nazi rule, and the cold-war fault line between East and West.

In its latest incarnation, Berlin will become the capital of the fifth German state in this century to be ruled from that city. The Federal Republic of Germany, a highly stable democracy in stark contrast to its predecessors, has been struggling with their burdensome architectural legacies. In the process, it has considered remedies as varied as outright destruction, refurbishment, and, in the case of the former Nazi central bank now being converted into the new Foreign Ministry, physical concealment.

The demolition plans stemmed partly from an aversion to occupying buildings created by dictatorial regimes. But West German officials moving to Berlin were also loath to accept any sacrifice in the quality of office space compared to that they occupied in Bonn.They doubted that the drab, aging governmental properties that came under the Federal Republic’s control after the demise of East Germany would provide efficient and comfortable quarters.An initial inspection of the premises confirmed their suspicions. “I asked myself if it were thinkable that the ruling class of an industrial nation would use such toilets,” senior Finance Ministry official Hans-Michael Meyer-Sebastian told me. “The conditions were dreadful.”4 The ministry eventually found it easy enough to upgrade the antiquated plumbing. Muting the militaristic tenor of its future home, Hermann Göring’s former Luftwaffe Headquarters, has proven a more difficult challenge. Germany’s desire to embody the image of a liberal democratic polity in Berlin’s new buildings, like the offices for the federal president—the head of state—and the Chancellery, which houses working quarters for the government chief, posed a separate formidable task.

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Introduction

As illustrated by the state-sponsored Paris exhibition, today’s Germany is at pains to assuage anyone casting a skeptical eye towards Berlin, soon to be capital of a country of 82 million people and Europe’s undisputed powerhouse. Unification restored the population and territory governed from Berlin to roughly their size prior to World War ii, turning the page on a national partition little regretted elsewhere on the continent. France regarded Germany’s division as an important constraint on its power.The author François Mauriac memorably observed that he loved Germany so much he was glad there were two of them,5 and since 1989 many Europeans have harbored fears about a German resurgence, nowadays focusing more on the economic than the military realm.

Germans too have worried about a revival of their own nationalist demons. Chancellor Helmut Kohl proffered integration with the European Union as the best antidote, a way to subsume his countrymen in a larger entity and thereby save them from themselves. The success of the venture, he ominously warned, was a question of “war and peace in the twenty-first century.”6 As they have negotiated tethering their fate to that of their fellow Europeans, German authorities have been grappling to find a design vocabulary that will turn its back on the monumentality typical of their history’s most worrisome periods.At the same time, they desire structures deemed worthy of a cosmopolitan capital and conducive to the urban scale and traditions of Berlin. There have been other major national capital projects in this century—Brasilia, New Delhi, Ankara, and Canberra are some examples—but perhaps never before has an endeavor of this kind been carried out with such anxiety about architectural symbolism.

“Political places . . . are not randomly or casually brought into existence,” political scientist Charles T. Goodsell writes in his study of political meaning in architecture. For these spaces are embedded with key clues about a nation’s power structure and nonverbal commentary about its people and civilization.7

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Introduction

The new Berlin will be filled with spaces of this kind. Planning them, German officials have weighed many concerns—among them, budget constraints, environmental protection, historic preservation, efficiency, and comfort—all of which are intertwined with the issue of symbolism. The officials vowed early on in the planning process that there would be no revival of Speer’s megalomaniacal schemes, of the grandiose air of old Prussian ministries, or of Wilhelmine pomposity. But vague yearnings also emerged for something more demonstrative than the postwar West German government seat. Bonn’s image as a faint-hearted capital doubtless played a role in the subconscious of many representatives who voted in favor of moving back to Berlin, argued Bundestag member Peter Glotz. For capitals are not only workplaces but stages for the visualization of power. As such, Bonn was “too practical, too realistic, and too average to satisfy the resurgent longing for history, for pathos, and for dignity.”8 In response to Speer’s overblown neoclassicism for Nazi Berlin, the Federal Republic based in Bonn studiously downplayed architectural grandeur. Government ministries embarked upon a new era in the small town along the Rhine by operating from unassuming, makeshift quarters.

German government chiefs from Ludwig Erhard to Kohl have occupied a squat, clean-lined official residence with the lowly label of “Kanzlerbungalow” (Chancellor’s Bungalow). The modern Parliament Building was designed with similar restraint. A low-rise pavilion, it contains a circular plenary chamber devised to avoid any trace of hierarchy.

The facade features much transparent glass to express openness and accessibility. Such symbolic use of clear glass flourished as the primary tenet in designing prestigious official West German structures.

A closer look at history and comparisons of state buildings under highly disparate political systems makes it difficult to sustain an automatic congruence between architectural form and ideological content.

Keeping in mind the frequent use of glass as an emblem for democratic transparency in Bonn, consider the Italian avant-garde architecture built

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Introduction

under Benito Mussolini’s reign. Giuseppe Terragni sought to symbolize the Italian fascist movement in his 1932 design for the Casa del Fascio (House of Fascism) in Como. “Here is the Mussolinian concept that fascism is a glass house into which everyone can peer, giving rise to the architecture that is the complement of this idea: no encumbrance, no barrier, no obstacle between the political hierarchy and the people,”Terragni said, injecting his own politics into form.9 Yet, despite the stylistic parallels in political systems of widely divergent ideologies, architecture can clearly express political meaning.

Goodsell has noted for example that Hitler’s Reich Chancellery office was more than a thousand square feet larger than the British House of Commons chamber. “The Reich Chancellery, with its incredible longitudinal dimensions and blatant symbolism, speaks volumes about the imperious nature of the Nazi state and the megalomania of its head. Just as articulately, the dimensions and the intimacy of the House of Commons say much about the British penchant for face-to-face political debate.”10 What signals will be sent by the official architecture of the new Berlin? Even if the postwar city long remained but a shadow of its former self, Berlin’s axial boulevards and surviving monumental buildings offer a far grander stage than Bonn upon which to raise the curtain for German history’s next act. A leading architectural advisor to Chancellor Kohl, former Federal Building Board president Barbara Jakubeit, argued that the electorate was ready for an architectural setting quite different from Bonn.“The citizens want their government to be located in a fixed place, not hidden in sackcloth and ashes.They want to be proud,” she said, before quickly catching herself. “Perhaps not proud. But they don’t want the government to have to creep away into any old mouse hole.”11 Jakubeit’s apparent concern about being misunderstood, coupled with her desire for Germany to move on, arose time and again in the debate about state architecture and what it says about Germany’s broader direction. Such a keen sensitivity to potential foreign criticism of design

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Introduction

gestures as a bellwether of renascent nationalism became second nature in Bonn.When a 1970s landscaping plan for the Chancellery there involved placing a large globelike sculpture in the forecourt, then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt vetoed the scheme for fear that the work might be misinterpreted as a sign of renewed German international aspirations. An anodyne bronze by Henry Moore was chosen instead, and the ill-conceived globe ended up in an out-of-the-way spot near the Rhine’s edge, where it still sits, threatening no one.

After Germany was reunified, some grew impatient with this kind of ingrained hesitancy.“In the capital of the most economically powerful country in Europe we cannot act as if we were a small banana republic,” said Bundestag Vice President Hans Klein, decrying the design philosophy behind the low-key Bonn Parliament Building as a “form of subservience” to the Allied powers who occupied the country in 1945.12 Kohl’s former Building Minister Oscar Schneider was another advocate of trading unobtrusive Bonn for a more expressive capital.“We Germans must finally take off this tattered Cinderella’s dress and find our way back to a healthy self-confidence,” he said.13 Michael Stürmer, a historian who served as an advisor to Kohl, called Bonn “the shamefaced capital of a shamefaced state” and bemoaned the unobtrusiveness of its architecture. “To some extent it was downright practical, particularly for motorists. But visitors from Rome,Washington, Paris, and Madrid had to be reminded from time to time that they were arriving at the center of a state and not on the grounds of an international insurance firm. . . . Now however the time has come, in matters of symbols, style, and architecture, to make up for what for forty years seemed superfluous because of the German past and the European future.”14 Mathias Schreiber, the cultural editor of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, also urged a bolder expression of Germany’s power. “The unending Bonn inconspicuousness, timidity, and embarrassment, the tranquillity of the seemingly improvised, the box-like buildings strewn along the edges of the street—all of that is an inadequate representation, an

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Introduction

unworthy form for a country that has regained its sovereignty.We should finally dare to be great again in our state architecture.The dream of representative buildings . . . is neither fascistic nor Grossdeutsch. It is as European as urban capitals like Vienna, Florence, Paris, London, Stockholm, and Berlin.”15 For present-day Berlin to become a focal point for national sentiment like the capitals of other countries—normal and seemingly unburdened by history—was the goal of many conservative politicians and intellectuals. After unification they envisioned Germany entering a new stage in which it would attain a distanced relationship to its Nazi past. As the Third Reich receded from immediacy, they saw the subdued period of Bonn-based government being replaced by a more assertive, self-confident Berlin republic. Germany, according to this scenario, would more and more resemble other nations that were free to pursue their own interests. And in the years following unification, the country did begin slowly assuming international responsibilities commensurate with its political and economic weight. Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel asked the United Nations to consider according Germany permanent membership in its Security Council. In 1996, the Bundestag voted by an overwhelming majority to send 2,000 soldiers to the Balkans as part of a un peacekeeping force—the first time that German combat troops had been deployed abroad since World War ii.

On the other side of the political spectrum, however, there was greater reluctance to take on these larger political responsibilities, and even less of a wish to project power through symbols like state architecture. Members of the German left preferred to see their country as a larger version of Switzerland or Austria. Pacifism and antinationalism, in their view, represented a proud postwar inheritance that could thwart a reprise of German hegemony.The opposition Social Democratic Party has generally resisted the deployment of German troops in the international arena. Some of its leading members worried that an abandonment of Bonn’s subdued format carried future risks for themselves and their

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Introduction

European neighbors. “After 1945 we regained the friendship of other peoples, not with grandiosity, but with modesty,” said a key player in Bonn’s architectural development, the Social Democratic parliamentarian Peter Conradi. “No one ever feared Bonn.We don’t want anyone to fear Berlin.”16 Throughout the decades when Bonn served as provisional capital, planners searchingly asked whether there was an official architectural style best suited to open societies, and how building design in a democracy differed from that under totalitarianism. In Berlin, where dictatorial rule held sway for much of this century, these questions are being posed with a new urgency. At times, the answers have been superficial. Simplistic semiotic equations—like the notion that glass facades amount to political transparency—have been pursued with exaggerated rigor, and German politicians have often displayed a tendency to take the symbol for the reality itself.

Still, the Germans planning Berlin have found that the questions themselves will not go away, in part because of fear of what others might think about their responses, and in part out of their own confusion over who they have become in the aftermath of unification.To understand the official architecture of unified Berlin and the issues it raises, I interviewed many of the leading architects, politicians, and planners involved in creating the new capital. These interviews, along with historical research and contemporary accounts in the German press and in architectural journals, formed the basis of this book.

I begin with an examination of the unusual official architectural path followed by West Germany in Bonn, and of the very different course taken by the Communist government in East Berlin. After both of these capitals became outmoded as a result of unification, architects and planners rushed back to their drawing boards.The subsequent chapters examine the design of the new Chancellery and of new offices for the federal presidency; the awkward process of siting today’s government ministries and other entities in the architectural remains of now extinct regimes; the

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Introduction

restoration of the former imperial parliament, the Reichstag, as home to the federal legislature; and the creation of a memorial to commemorate past horrors and iniquities perpetrated from Berlin—each of them key components in Germany’s effort to resolve its capital dilemma.

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